Two Key Factors To Your Social Media Success

Technology is growing at an exponential rate; we truly have no way of keeping up via traditional means when it comes to tracking. Organizations struggle to stay focused, struggle to maintain, and struggle to provide systems and services that meet their business objectives. The shift in how business gets done is making it more and more difficult to maintain profit margins and business lifestyles that most are accustom to.

Today’s I.T. Strategic Planning is shedding its skin and taking on a new look and meaning. Ramping up I.T. staff is no longer the norm; reducing I.T. Teams and virtualization is; it allows organizations to be more financially responsible. CIO’s have a tougher time justifying their existence, the role is becoming more and more extinct, and is easily handled without the large investment in overhead. As much as it pains me to say that, I have to accept the new landscape of how Information Technology is implemented and managed. There’s still a need for CIO’s in large organizations but new companies are building streamlined teams, technology allows for startups to have fewer management roles. This new model allows for higher profits and less management of people.

Customer service is making a huge shift in what it means, Customer Service or Support is NOT fixing or adding a new feature, it is about Communication and Solving problems. This gap is hurting far too many businesses, they need to pay attention and listen to what their customers are saying about them, what they want from them.

Small businesses are literally taking a fetal position when it comes to understanding the change taking place, that the Internet is empowering the individual rather than the large organization. The power of the person has been lifted to a level no one saw coming, all because of the Internet. The Internet is the game changer; the Internet was and is clearly misunderstood by the smaller Mom & Pop businesses. The Internet solved the problem of digital distribution, this is an Access Based Economy where we click to get. The transition for small business can be easy to most difficult, undertsanding technology or how technology will help them is the key.

If there ever was a need in your local marketplace it’s helping those small business understand that they won’t be able to continue as they have and enjoy the life they hoped to build when they opened the doors. More importantly, those business owners need to learn about humility, be willing to say they don’t understand and do indeed need help with the Internet. Most small business owners had an Entrepreneurial Seizure, they thought because they knew how to do the work they knew how to run a business. I recommend reading Michael Gerber’s book, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It(Amazon Affiliate Link) to get a clear understanding of what I’m referring to.

Today a couple of things scream for attention in my humble opinion:

1. Listening – Listen to what is being said about your brand and or business.
2. Filtering Content is more important than creating it.

Listening & Filtering Content are two key factors to your Social Media success, small & big businesses at large still haven’t grasped these two concepts with any kind of clarity.

We are in an Extreme Reputation Economy, popularity is becoming a Social Capital, and it will be as valuable as real money in the coming months if it hasn’t happened already. How you present yourself, your product, and your business will generate a reputation, take the time to craft your reputation.

What do you think?

<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887307280?ie=UTF8&tag=owengrea-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0887307280″>The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It</a><img src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=owengrea-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0887307280″ width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”” style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;” />

Owen – agree – I am in the midst of a four part blog series on my recent encounters with large corporations who I feel are failing in ways of customer service via Social Media.

While it can be hard to do (the listening about your brand) there are so many tools out there that are free or low cost to help companies monitor.

In my opinion larger corporations have an advantage that maybe a solopreneur doesn’t since (presumably) they have more manpower than the solopreneur does. They also have a more established brand than what most solo’s may have as well.

However, the reputation of the solo is probably more fragile than that of a large corporation.

All in all…you are correct – technology is growing faster and quicker than we can possibly keep up with. But we can harness what we have now to monitor and filter.

There just seems to be so much confusion with small business owners, the Social Media Guru’s don’t help the situation at all. The larger the organization the more resources they most likely have, that means they can play the game longer. The solopreneur is vunerable on all levels unless they have an endless stream of revenue to draw from, if so they can wait things out. If not, the game is shorter.

Filter Content will be one of the keys, also using search to ensure they gathering on a broad scope.

I always expect the same worn out themes when I encounter these sort of posts but I must say the simplicity of your points speak to tremendous value.

The 2nd point is what interests me most. I realize your main focus is helping organizations filter data they are consuming but I think this can be extended into a social media role as well.

In the vast internet we are all in need of human filters that help bring the best content to the surface. People are the most efficient signal-to-noise filter and the role as a connector and recommendor is becoming more crucial. (Putting multiple data streams in front of multiple eyeballs was the genius of the now languishing Friendfeed).

It would appear you and I have the same interests but with a twist. I look forward to your four part series, it’s easy to spot the failures by large corporations than it is to see the ones doing it better. I’m not the listening is as hard as you mention, it takes time and it takes knowing what questions to ask me thinks.

The filtering of content is a tougher task because you have to know what to look for in the content. I agree, I would have someone on the Social Media Team do the filtering.

One of the larger issues is, many if not most organizations don’t know how to share, they only know how to push out, to broadcast in an outbound way, rather than exercise the inbound method.

[…] really got to thinking about this when I read @OwenGreaves blog post about social media success earlier this week when I had already started my four part series on three companies that are active […]